LAMENTATIONS 63::72
BIO
elena minor is the author of TITULADA, a book of bilingual poetry. Her work has been published in more than two dozen literary journals and anthologized in Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century, Angels of the Americlypse: New Latino Writing, Best American Experimental Writing (BAX), Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts in Los Angeles and Resist Much Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance. Most recently her work has appeared in Midway Journal, Two Degrees Celsius, Inlandia and Uproot. She is the founding editor of PALABRA (2006-2012) and teaches community-based creative writing to high school students.
(Excavations 16-21)
And
shall we talk about it again?
Sit
around a hoary scarred table and recount
Old
Actions and Lost Beginnings?
And
is the Language any Different?
And
if we spit out New Words
Do
they get caught in the wind
Again?
Blown
back
in
our faces
As
if they had been
roundly
anticipated, shouted out once too often
then
twisted inside out?
Who
are these rampage children—wooden people
with
their large thunderous bodies
grubby
overripe hands and stunted heads?
Mosca
lumpen who feed rapaciously on their own
detritus,
slurp the gutter waters of [m]oral venom.
Shall
we make them
Run
hard
Cry
aloud
Rain
brutal their bloodied fists
on
a falser god?
Or
shall we come to know—
Grasp
with scarred burnt hands
the
What that must be Won
Over
and Over Again
Again,
Never
to
settle in homey comfort,
Put
up its blistered feet
Sleep
soundly in its own house?
Shall
we?
Shall
we?
Now.
HIJACK
It’s
not that we’ve ever said that
overdrawn word
It’s
not that we’ve never wanted to
But
How
many times did we jump
into
a California dream
machine
and floor it
--head
north by south
|… ¡úpala! me voy pa’l norte …|
only
to let up & turn back our
misery
a bitter
root
claw in our boiling belly
We
clung / ¡clang! / clung to you as
if
a
natural landing
instead
you
were a phantom place
planed
smooth like
sand
in its sudden
shift
to desert — days & gulped
down~ed
the
decades numbered back-to-back-to-
weak-willed
hollow digits carved all
or
none and blown toxic-o-logically
\worldwide\
as reign disaster
distilled
slow-drip acid from an amp’d up thirst
to
wail at recolored sunsets curved wrong
&
burned raw by each new dawn
&
while we crooned the long gone count you howled
at
the moon and couldn’t see
it
hang
fire
from its dark side
|… how now does it speak …|
|… what now do we hear …|
|… …|
Descent
is indifferent drawn motion
blows it/s/low
selfs
out circles
right
cornered
to
angled arms
—pushed—stretched
thin
… thinner … thinner
lines
writ
man
by mother
father
as son
sired
by time & sound
in
carved space
Where
we carry word
call
and cry
My country ’tis of thee …
My country ’tis of these …
NEXT TO YOU
(the sum has no equal)
You
Were never a part from it.
They know you and no
one wanted to fake the deep accounting.
Blue & red strains still jumble with white for purple
waves of rotting grain and miscegenated corn
born in the lab — U S.A. ||
|| México limits a
line long as the snake
slithers into shade the eagle
flies feasting on putrid meat.